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Well, I am not sure that is how it all went down but you got the idea. I would like to make a Genesis movie starring the original Three Stooges. Curly can keep answering God, saying "Exactly, Godgy-wodgy" and the three of them have a Pauline moment of insiration and decide to found a church, naming Moe as Pope. (Everyone knows Saul of Tarsus didn't convert to anything on the Road to Damascus; he simply realized that the religious con might make more shekels than doing felonious stuff.)

Yes, and Saul told 2 distinctly different stories of his conversion at different times, so which one was true? According to the early christians, most thought he was lying. Scribes usually wrote the epistles but sometimes Paul would write "in his own hand" simply to give authority to his teachings. He would add a line or footnote. You might say there was a lot of forgery even in those times and the faithful got accustomed to the appearance of writings whether they could read or not.

This doesn't say much for the shiester of Tarsus, but it says plenty for your Holly Bibble.

Joan Denoo, do you suppose that Christian children learn to think contra-logic, e.g. the fallacy of circular reasoning, told as they are that the proof of the Bible being the literal world of God is in the Bible itself. Might such children grow up using such illogicality in other spheres of human behavior?

Exactly! Children who become socialized to be dependent, passive and subordinate, do so as an adult. There is the assumption that only females learn this passive lifestyle, but males do too, they just have to figure out where, on the pecking order, do they fit. We all have seen dependent, passive and subordinate males and many of them become excellent bullies to someone smaller or lower on the social scale.

A child learns to obey his/her parent, because the parent told him/her to do so. Along comes adulthood, trained to depend on prayer to an unseen, unheard, unknowable god, and carries attitudes, beliefs, customs, traditions and values into his/her personal and professional life, and a man or woman can find someone to acquiesce to or to dominate. If they become leaders, it is because they have learned to obey, not think. Corporations and military are brimming over with supremacist leanings.

A parent who wants to raise a critical thinking adult has to provide the training for them to learn how to do so. A child needs room to make mistakes and to learn from them. Thinking critically is not a gift that suddenly envelopes one at adulthood. It is training, experimenting, exploring, discovering, asking, doubting, being skeptical.

That there remain people living today who not only believe the story of Abraham and Isaac but take it as an example of how to behave is about as frightening a concept as I can imagine. It's only made worse by a supposed savior who insists that you must hate your mother, father, sister, brother, indeed your own life, if you mean to follow him.

Blind, unthinking, unknowing, uncaring stupidity, so obvious one couldn't help but trip over it, yet they can't see it.